‘Bed Rest Mom’ talks about other possible side of pregnancy

Cynthia Lockrey knows a thing or two about writing. The former CVRD communications manager has just published her first book Bed Rest Mom and there’s another one on the way.

Book, that is. Not baby.

Both publications were years in the making and cover topics she’s well acquainted with.

With her second publication due in September, Bed Rest Mom was released on April 3 and will be available at Volume One Bookstore in Duncan as well as nationally and internationally.

“With my daughter in 2008 I had a high-risk pregnancy and I was put on home bed rest,” she explained. “When they first put me on bed rest they didn’t really explain to me what that meant. It was a vague term and because it was very vague and because I’m a Type-A, I thought I could go out for dinner. I thought I could do these little trips and I ended up almost medivaced to Seattle…”

The ordeal was stressful for the mom to be and she found little in terms of help until an OBGYN eventually explained explicitly what bed rest should entail. She spent the next three months on her couch.

“It was pretty depressing. It was pretty isolating, and then I found some ways to get through it,” she said.

A few years later in 2012 she was pregnant with her son.

“I was told I had the same condition they had told me I would probably not have again, placenta previa, but I had it.”

That time, however, she wasn’t allowed to sit on her couch. She was admitted to hospital.

“I spent six weeks in a hospital bed an hour and a half away from my daughter [then three years old] and my husband,” she said. “I thought I was a pro at bed rest because I’d done it with [my daughter] for three months but I’d never done it in a hospital bed.”

It was a gut-wrenching ordeal.

“My first night I just bawled my eyes out and it was hard and it was emotional and it was scary,” she said.

Lockrey made friends with the other women in similar situations and they bonded, supporting each other through “some pretty traumatic times,” she explained.

Following the birth of her son, Lockrey’s husband encouraged her to share her story.

“There’s nothing out there,” she said. “If you hit Google on ‘bed rest’ you get a little bit. Or if you buy a pregnancy book there’s a couple of paragraphs. So I started writing it and then life got busy because I had a baby. I started doing patient advocacy work in Ontario in the maternal health care side as a volunteer. then we moved here.”

Then her husband reminded her she never did share that story.

“I decided to finish writing it and I got a publishing contract from a publishing company from Vancouver and I interviewed a bunch of moms that I met when I was in the hospital and moms I knew that had home bed rest. I wanted to share their stories because I know I had my experience, which was one, but so I had all of their experiences, and so I’m sharing these different voices of women of how to survive this tough time,” she said.

”I know how isolating it is to be on your couch or on a hospital bed and unless you have a friend whose been there, which most don’t, it’s very hard. A lot of women brag about how they worked until a week before they gave birth. It’s hard to hear that. You feel like you’re less normal more and more,” she said. “That’s why I wrote it. I wanted to speak to women where they truly are at, that their friends may not be able to talk to them about.”